I suppose I should qualify that, as it’s a bit unfair to Buffett.
Yes, Buffett is a professional investor and more expert than me at it, which counts for quite a bit. But he’s also human, and humans don’t do a very good job of anticipating economic activity beyond a horizon of a few years. Importantly, most humans have a laughably brief idea of what constitutes a “long term”.
I’d estimate that Buffett’s bet constitutes quite a few bits of evidence toward the profitability of Wal-mart over, say, a 2 year time horizon. But I was already leaning in that direction, so it doesn’t move my posterior probability by very much. In contrast, I’d estimate that it provides a much smaller number of bits over a 10-year horizon: if I had to name a number, I’d say 2 bits. That’s a nudge in Buffett’s direction, but not a very big one.
Now, Wal-mart is not so foolish as to have played the derivatives shell games that exploded in the financial industry, nor do they have any substantial debt exposure. But I think a big source of risk, unconsidered in the standard analysis and probably unconsidered by Buffett, is their interdependence on China.
Sidebar:
Inflation triggers human biases: it causes people to miscalculate and believe they have more utilons merely because they have more money. (This is the essence of Keynesian stimulus: trick people into diverting their money from savings into spending. Regardless of whether you hold this is good or bad, it is what stimulus does.) Spending within an inflated economy is a complicated matter that I won’t delve into, but international trade is where it gets interesting.
Imagine two countries, A and B, which are trade partners. A injects a stimulus. People in A start buying more goods, including imported goods from B, with their freshly-printed money. This creates a trade imbalance between A and B. When this happens the buyer (implicitly or explicitly) exchanges A’s currency for B’s. On the currency exchange markets, B’s currency goes up (demanded) while A’s goes down (supplied). Thus, in the absence of further intervention, the exchange rate will cause the price of B’s goods to rise in A’s currency until A can no longer afford them, putting the brakes on the trade imbalance.
However, the end of the trade imbalance can cause adjustment problems: when people made plans, they baked in assumptions that simply weren’t true. People in A used to cheap $GOOD are suddenly faced with rising prices. Manufacturers in B were used to steady output but now face a significant slowdown, perhaps turning that new factory from a brilliant investment into a frustrating white elephant.
Magic wand: more stimulus! Now B gets in on the act: B injects stimulus, tricking the people of B into spending instead of saving and filling the factories with busywork. Thanks to imports and foreign investments, money starts to flow out of their country, causing their currency to come back down from the stratosphere. And the cheap currency exchange rates make A look like a good investment now...
But in the end, what has this circle accomplished: both A and B have severely devalued their currencies in relation to any third-party country C, both have depleted their citizen’s savings accounts, and both have huge government debts due to their respective stimuli. Oh, and each has lots of manufacturing capacity that goes to waste unless the other is actively digging a money pit.
End sidebar.
Note that what the U.S. and China have is not quite what I described above. China is inflating, but the U.S. is inflating faster, and the dollar-yuan currency peg means the exchange rate isn’t closing the trade valve. Therefore the trade balance persists, with China the continuous exporter. This creates a huge pileup of U.S. dollars that no one is sure what to do with, and it also means there’s little incentive for people in China to import from U.S. manufacturers. (The Chinese government owns most of the dollars: it printed yuan to buy them and thus fix the price. Therefore the dollars are not in private hands, therefore there is little investment flowing into the U.S. from China.)
China is painfully exposed: the situation is clearly unsustainable, it took herculean effort to keep it from exploding this time around, and it’s going to explode in the not-so-distant future. In desperation to keep the Keynesian pump primed, the Chinese government has plowed enormous amounts of stimulus into their domestic economy: the government funded the construction of an entire city, Ordos, merely to boost GDP. (Spoiler: no one lives there, but prices are sky-high: real estate “always goes up” in China.) The next major economic crisis will probably (0.80) start with China, and will almost certainly (0.98+) bring about a crisis severe enough that it puts China into a recession.
From Wal-mart’s perspective, stimulus in China is a mixed blessing: it provides a tiny relief valve through which piled up U.S. dollars can leave the country, and it also subsidizes Chinese manufacturers to lower prices, but it also creates inflationary pressure within China and thus causes labor and manufacturing prices (measured in yuan, not utilons) to rise dramatically. The whole thing a chaotic powder keg, and the blast is not directionally pointed away from Wal-mart.
In short, expect China starting today to follow a similar 30-year trajectory as the one laid out by Japan starting in 1980, complete with one or more “lost decades”. (The situation is not exactly analogous, but strongly suggestive.)
And on the timescale of 5 or even 10 years, he may even be right. Yay for him.
I suppose I should qualify that, as it’s a bit unfair to Buffett.
Yes, Buffett is a professional investor and more expert than me at it, which counts for quite a bit. But he’s also human, and humans don’t do a very good job of anticipating economic activity beyond a horizon of a few years. Importantly, most humans have a laughably brief idea of what constitutes a “long term”.
I’d estimate that Buffett’s bet constitutes quite a few bits of evidence toward the profitability of Wal-mart over, say, a 2 year time horizon. But I was already leaning in that direction, so it doesn’t move my posterior probability by very much. In contrast, I’d estimate that it provides a much smaller number of bits over a 10-year horizon: if I had to name a number, I’d say 2 bits. That’s a nudge in Buffett’s direction, but not a very big one.
Now, Wal-mart is not so foolish as to have played the derivatives shell games that exploded in the financial industry, nor do they have any substantial debt exposure. But I think a big source of risk, unconsidered in the standard analysis and probably unconsidered by Buffett, is their interdependence on China.
Sidebar:
Inflation triggers human biases: it causes people to miscalculate and believe they have more utilons merely because they have more money. (This is the essence of Keynesian stimulus: trick people into diverting their money from savings into spending. Regardless of whether you hold this is good or bad, it is what stimulus does.) Spending within an inflated economy is a complicated matter that I won’t delve into, but international trade is where it gets interesting.
Imagine two countries, A and B, which are trade partners. A injects a stimulus. People in A start buying more goods, including imported goods from B, with their freshly-printed money. This creates a trade imbalance between A and B. When this happens the buyer (implicitly or explicitly) exchanges A’s currency for B’s. On the currency exchange markets, B’s currency goes up (demanded) while A’s goes down (supplied). Thus, in the absence of further intervention, the exchange rate will cause the price of B’s goods to rise in A’s currency until A can no longer afford them, putting the brakes on the trade imbalance.
However, the end of the trade imbalance can cause adjustment problems: when people made plans, they baked in assumptions that simply weren’t true. People in A used to cheap $GOOD are suddenly faced with rising prices. Manufacturers in B were used to steady output but now face a significant slowdown, perhaps turning that new factory from a brilliant investment into a frustrating white elephant.
Magic wand: more stimulus! Now B gets in on the act: B injects stimulus, tricking the people of B into spending instead of saving and filling the factories with busywork. Thanks to imports and foreign investments, money starts to flow out of their country, causing their currency to come back down from the stratosphere. And the cheap currency exchange rates make A look like a good investment now...
But in the end, what has this circle accomplished: both A and B have severely devalued their currencies in relation to any third-party country C, both have depleted their citizen’s savings accounts, and both have huge government debts due to their respective stimuli. Oh, and each has lots of manufacturing capacity that goes to waste unless the other is actively digging a money pit.
End sidebar.
Note that what the U.S. and China have is not quite what I described above. China is inflating, but the U.S. is inflating faster, and the dollar-yuan currency peg means the exchange rate isn’t closing the trade valve. Therefore the trade balance persists, with China the continuous exporter. This creates a huge pileup of U.S. dollars that no one is sure what to do with, and it also means there’s little incentive for people in China to import from U.S. manufacturers. (The Chinese government owns most of the dollars: it printed yuan to buy them and thus fix the price. Therefore the dollars are not in private hands, therefore there is little investment flowing into the U.S. from China.)
China is painfully exposed: the situation is clearly unsustainable, it took herculean effort to keep it from exploding this time around, and it’s going to explode in the not-so-distant future. In desperation to keep the Keynesian pump primed, the Chinese government has plowed enormous amounts of stimulus into their domestic economy: the government funded the construction of an entire city, Ordos, merely to boost GDP. (Spoiler: no one lives there, but prices are sky-high: real estate “always goes up” in China.) The next major economic crisis will probably (0.80) start with China, and will almost certainly (0.98+) bring about a crisis severe enough that it puts China into a recession.
From Wal-mart’s perspective, stimulus in China is a mixed blessing: it provides a tiny relief valve through which piled up U.S. dollars can leave the country, and it also subsidizes Chinese manufacturers to lower prices, but it also creates inflationary pressure within China and thus causes labor and manufacturing prices (measured in yuan, not utilons) to rise dramatically. The whole thing a chaotic powder keg, and the blast is not directionally pointed away from Wal-mart.
In short, expect China starting today to follow a similar 30-year trajectory as the one laid out by Japan starting in 1980, complete with one or more “lost decades”. (The situation is not exactly analogous, but strongly suggestive.)